A few years ago, MMM as a concept was used by consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries only. But in recent times, its popularity has spread to other industries as well. As the penetration of MMM in various categories and markets expanded, the discipline also witnessed advancements.

Till recently, regression was used by treating most of the marketing variables as linear and media, especially TV as non linear. As the usage of MMM expanded, the utility of the same also expanded beyond just TV weight setting. The approach found increasing usage in determining the type of distribution outlet that influences sales/market share, determination of optimal price for the brand and the inter-relationship of media especially between the paid, owned and earned media on sales/market share movement. Increasingly MMM is being used not only for deriving the insights but as a "live" scenario planner answering "what if" questions to the marketing practitioner.

The client is an ERP applications software marketer who sells the application to small and medium size businesses. The company maintains a database of over 500,000 businesses in the country with contact details of key personnel. The client uses their customer database to target customers through direct mail, email and has a sales force to visit customers.

Recently, on the advice of a leading consultant, the client released TV and radio ads to improve brand imagery and generate leads. The campaigns ran mostly concurrently for a period of 4 months.

The client wanted to know the effect of the various media on total sales, with particular focus on the effect of TV and Radio and how it has contributed to the sales and brand imagery.

FMCG marketers sell through a chain of distributors. The distributor uses a team of salesmen who visits the retailer on a weekly/fortnightly basis to take orders.

The distributor salesman takes the orders from the retailer using a handheld device. The device displays about 8-10 items in a menu format and the salesman scrolls the device from top to bottom, picking up the SKUs from the menu and inputting the quantity ordered. The time taken for order fulfillment may exceed fifteen minutes. This is colossal waste of salesman's time. This paper offers a methodology that predicts which items are most likely to be bought by a store. Once the items most likely to be bought are known, the handheld is configured to display only those items on the screen, and pushing those with low likelihood to the bottom. This way the salesman uses less time in scrolling and more time in selling.

The client is a large marketer in FMCG category. In recent times, their FMCG brand in the matured urban market has faced stagnation in sales. The client is trying to get marketing insights on their media plans which can help increase media throughput and thereby increase sales and market share.

Standard market mix models are only able to capture the effectiveness of different media vehicles in driving sales and their overall RoI. It offers a generic attribution of sales to TV but several questions remain unanswered.

Driving mind measure for a brand is one of the core challenges these days.

Mind measure refers to top of mind awareness, spontaneous awareness, brand consideration, etc. Even though media inputs play a crucial role in driving these mind measures, the content of communication plays an equally important role.

Thus measuring brand attributes (product based or proposition based) that are directly or indirectly communicated takes a front seat in terms of priority for any brand health management.

The study of the interrelationship between the components of Paid, Owned and Earned Media is of great interest to marketing practitioners and academia alike. With the advent of digital age and an increasing trend for online social presence, the online medium has become an important tool for the marketers to connect to their target audience. The various elements of POEM mix involve a high level of inter-relationships and it is this convergent impact on the business objective that is imperative for the marketer to understand.

The elements of POEM or Convergent Medium interact continuously among themselves and the marketer is faced with a 2-fold challenge of:

Estimating the relationship between the elements of POEM - both direct and indirect relationships

Establish synergy premiums that are due to the synergistic effects when two media are used concurrently.

The key task of advertising media planners is to determine the best media schedule of advertising exposures for a certain budget. The planner could choose the media schedule in one of two ways - a continuous strategy or a pulsing strategy. In a continuous strategy the planner schedules advertising more or less evenly over all the weeks, so as to be present at all times. In a pulsing strategy the planner advertises in some weeks, often heavily, and not at all in other times. In this pulsing option the media planners hope that the heavy advertising conducted in one period will be remembered favorably overtime, especially at times when making purchase decisions.

This paper offers a methodology that simulates the sales generated through the year using different scheduling strategies and chooses the one which maximizes sales.

The quality of advertisement creative is often judged by one of two methods. One approach is the ability of ads to win awards at one of the many ad pageants held every year. However this process completely ignores the selling aspect of the ad and merely applauds the narrative.

Marketers, who actually pay for the creation of these ads, however use another method. They depend on market research techniques to judge ad copy. The Market Research approach is certainly more objective but may be error prone if respondents differ between what they say and what they do.

This paper proposes to use an analytical solution to the measurement of ad effectiveness, by isolating copy effects from those of media weights. It uses just one parameter to make the call � the ability of the advertisement to sell the product.